Its been many years since I have used my wordpress blog but decided (for some reason that may eventually come to me) too start posting a few more things again.
Suffice to say this is just a short post since #Nodevember got me all excited to learn the power of Blenders procedural shader networks. Honestly though it didn’t start out well. I began not really trying to make any specific shape or with a goal in mind, but with the desire to understand what each node did and how it influenced the output. You will see what resulted was some strange tent type shape where the colours are defined by the geometries position in 3D Space.
I came back to it a few days later with the intention to work towards a specific goal. I settled on a wine glass, mostly for two reasons. The first was that I had recently been watching the BlenderCon 2019 videos, one of which covers a shader network for optimised glass rendering that I really wanted to try. You can see that in the box (top right corner of the node network). The second reason was to create something relatively complex that also extruded or stretched upward on the z-axis, and then folded in on itself.
Unfortunately my first render with lighting looked a little off, the base of the glass felt more like a wet puddle than a glass base and the shape did not feel very good. I got into the details and tweaked the subtle values using RGB Curves and a better lighting setup this was the result.
The network did not change dramatically, but I am really impressed with what you can displace from just a simple sphere. Obviously this does not compare to the work being done by the amazing artists doing daily #Nodevember posts but I’d like to think its wet my appetite for it.
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CHRIS CUNNINGTON 